FAIRVIEW CITY COUNCIL WILL TAKE LEAD IN DEVELOPING MUSEUM-GROWTH FUND

The City Council has agreed to take the lead in developing a financial package that will provide funds for a major expansion of the Fairview Museum of History and Art.

The city will ask the state Community Impact Board for a $494,465 grant and a $324,904 20-year, no-interest loan to cover most of the estimated $855,465 cost of the expansion.The rest of the cost will be paid with private donations. The $60,000 needed to qualify for the 20-year loan will also be raised locally .

The $60,000 will be placed in an interest-bearing sinking fund that, with accumulated interest, will pay off the loan at the end of the 20-year period.

Most of the expansion will occur at an elementary school that the city has purchased form the North Sanpete School District. The building will be remodeled to provide space for a number of exhibits.

One of the main exhibits will be a Columbian mammoth panorama that will include a replica of a mammoth skeleton discovered east of Fairview two years ago. The replica will be placed in a setting that represents the habitat of the prehistoric creature.

Slides, drawings and other material will also have a place in the panorama.

Exhibits of Avard Fairbanks sculptures will be another attraction. The plaster castings of some Fairbanks pieces were contributed to the museum by Fairbanks and his wife several years ago and are on display in the museum's main building - another and even older elementary school.

The Fairbanks family, since Avard Fairbanks' death, has given the museum other castings of his work, which will be placed in the addition.

The two buildings, both located on the same block and replaced, in time, by a more modern schoolhouse, will be connected with walkways, and extensive landscaping will be done, according to Carl L. Swensen, museum board president.

Many of the exhibits - of early mining machinery and farm equipment, for example - are located on the grounds.

"The museum has two pioneer themes - history and art," Swensen says. "And with the addition of the mammoth panorama, the museum will portray something of the area's prehistoric past, too. "